World War I (1914-1918) played a critical role in advancing the nursing profession in the United States and the role of female nurses in general. During World War I women joined both the U.S. Army and Navy as nurses although they were never recognized as either enlisted or commissioned personnel. Even so, the nursing ranks grew during the war rising from 573 nurses in the U.S. Army at the beginning of the war to over 21,480 Army nurses by the war’s end. The U.S. Navy also employed around 1500 nurses by 1918. Most Army nurses were stationed overseas; many were recruited from the American Red Cross.
World War I was one of the deadliest wars in human history with an estimated 40 million military and civilian casualties. Because of the mechanization of warfare, the nature of battlefield wounds changed as artillery shells and machine guns ripped apart combatants’ bodies causing dismemberment and death. Poisonous gases including phosgene, chlorine, mustard, and tear gas were introduced, and victims were often left with life-long disabilities. “Shell shock” was also identified seriously for the first time as a result of psychological battle damage. Rapid treatment became essential to saving soldiers’ lives, leading to the development of evacuation and triage stations near the battlefront. In these instances, nurses proved crucial to saving men’s lives as they helped to stabilize the wounded on the front lines. Many nurses learned to drive ambulances, advance orthopedic rehabilitative medicine, provide mental health care, and some even became proficient with administering anesthesia, a life-saving intervention that allowed doctors more time to treat serious war wounds while patients were unconscious.
Not all women who served in World War I were trained nurses. Many flocked to the nursing profession and received on-the-job training as members of volunteer nursing auxiliary services. In these situations, they usually worked to support trained nurses often in very dangerous battlefront situations. In the United States, many people were frustrated by America’s isolationist stance and went to Europe to serve as early as 1914 even though the country did not formally enter the war until 1917. Many of these individuals were women who traveled to Europe to offer nursing services.
This was the situation for Katherine "Kate" Talcott Cooke, a wealthy and well-educated woman born and raised in a mansion on Bute Street in Norfolk, Virginia who felt compelled to sail to France to help the war effort. Bored with her life in upper-class society, she perceived the regular routines of women in her situation as stultifying. She stated, "I abhor the women in my circle of family and friends who talk of nothing but camellias and babies.” Kate was vehemently pro-American intervention and thought President Woodrow Wilson was playing politics by not intervening before the 1916 election.
Kate arrived in Paris in 1915 and quickly joined the auxiliary nurses at the American Hospital in Paris. That establishment predated the war but in 1914 the governors of the hospital decided to dedicate their time and resources to helping the French face the ramifications of war. The French government loaned the Americans an unfinished high school that American architects quickly turned into a 600-bed auxiliary hospital. The American Chamber of Commerce in Paris sent out calls to the nation and soon doctors and nurses from all over the United States arrived in the French capital. Their arrival reflected a massive American humanitarian effort to support the French during World War I, and these volunteers also helped gradually sway the American public away from neutrality.
Kate Cooke joined the humanitarian cause. Her family’s wealth was essential because auxiliary nurses were not initially paid and had to rely on other means of support. Even when small allowances were allocated later in the war to volunteer auxiliary nurses, it was never enough to live on. Kate enjoyed a bank account tied to her family’s wealth which allowed her to stay in Paris throughout the war.
Kate Cooke’s letters to her mother written from Paris during World War I are housed in the Slover Library’s Sargeant Memorial Collection in Norfolk as part of the records of the Virginia War History Commission and provide the source material for this article. Like many aristocratic girls of her generation, she became interested in both World War I and the women's suffrage movement. Kate Cooke went to France as a twenty-six-year-old single woman to join the ex-Pat community and experience Parisian life. At the American Hospital in Paris, she was assigned to the "American Ambulance,” the section that eventually had 35 Model-T ambulances that medics and nurses, including Kate, drove to the frontlines to retrieve wounded soldiers and return them to Paris to nurse them back to health. Kate was a nurse's aide, a position in which she learned to administer anesthesia. During her years of work in Paris, she showed real agency as an independent woman, willing to risk her own life in the service of others.
Kate was no saint. She hated the Germans who were often patients at the hospital, and she had little patience for men suffering from "shell shock," a battlefield injury that was just beginning to be understood during World War I. Still, she toiled tirelessly in Paris often going weeks at a time with no days off and working long shifts that sometimes put her in harm’s way. She was often exhausted and suffered emotionally when she lost patients she had grown close to as part of her nursing duties. She was frustrated by American friends who wrote to her to ask that she send them French delicacies, and she had a hard time explaining to her mother and family that her long hours at the hospital left her little time to sightsee and shop. Kate did, however, find the time to fall in love with one of her patients, Jules Lechaux, a doctor whom she married in 1919. She came home to Norfolk for their wedding but returned to France where she raised three sons and suffered through World War II while Jules was imprisoned for his work in the French Resistance. Jules and Kate died in 1972 and 1981 respectively, but Kate wished for she and Jules to be buried in Norfolk, and their grave is located in Elmwood Cemetery.
The following is a transcript of one of Kate Cooke’s most poignant letters to her mother, dated only July 2nd, with no year indicated. It evokes the trauma nurses often experienced in losing patients and hints at the kind of quality care she offered men who had been seriously injured on the Western Front.
“Dearest Mother, Your daughter is feeling pretty done up today. Yesterday our poor man died, quite suddenly, without any warning. The nurse had left me to give him lunch and had gone, and I was giving him soup when suddenly, I saw he was very bad. I did not know what to do for I dared not leave him but knew I must get a doctor, when Dr. Cutter came into the room. He said he was going but there was nothing to do. So he went to get the new doctors who had taken charge that morning, and I love them for the way they acted. They were so good about staying and doing, or appearing to do, something for him. But of course now we know there was shrapnel in his brain. So all those weeks, when we worked, and hope[d], he was doomed. Oh, the useless suffering, for even the doctors said it must have been “hell.” The useless suffering – it is that which simply knocks us up. I suppose I am a goose to write so soon after, [but] I can’t think of anything except his poor, suffering face, but now the ward is so suddenly light, nothing to do, for he demanded all the attention, something had to be done every minute. Now I sit with folded hands, so writing is better than thinking. I had my cry when I came in this morning, and I must not let go before the men anymore. It won’t do. But when I think of his wife arriving from Rouen with his two little girls, 5 and 6 years old, thinking he was getting quickly well, and finding him gone, totally unconscious, but oh, so noisy and dreadful, it makes me sick. His poor little children, what will they do? He was such a nice man, I can’t bear to think of the consideration he gave me in my nursing him. Well enough of that, you must excuse me. It is the person I see die, and I felt he was peculiarly mine, as I was with him from the minute he came in.”
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References:
“Contributions of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in World War I.” Army Nurse Corps Association. .
Crawford, John. Ěý2017. “The Americanization of Paris: A Case Study in American Philanthropy in 1914-1918." The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 38, no. 2: 151-159.Ěý
Glass, Charles. 2014. American Hospital of Paris: Brave Volunteers and Heroes of the Resistance. Paris: American Hospital of Paris.
Hallett, Christine. 2014. Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War. Oxford University Press.
Slover Library, Norfolk, Virginia. Sargeant Memorial Collection. Papers of Miss Kate Cooke. Virginia War History Commission. MSS 0000-182, Box 17/18.